At first glance, this craftsman-style home set in the hills of Northern California looks like a typical home for a family with two-and-a-half kids and a labrador retriever. But if you had special goggles that could read the home’s energy use, you’d quickly see how this isn’t a typical home. Rather it's PulteGroup’s zero net energy (ZNE) home prototype, bringing the future of green energy to life with the power of Rinnai tankless water heaters.

For Pulte, the goal of the home was to develop better processes for building clean energy homes for the future, and specifically, to be a prototype of the new…